ISB House

The constraint was the plot: 10 marla, DHA Islamabad. The answer was the section. Rather than accepting the limits of the footprint, the house goes down as deliberately as it goes up: basement, lower ground, road level, ground floor, first floor, roof. Five meaningful levels on a tight urban plot. The section is where the space is made.

Below ground, the basement is fully lived in: a gathering space large enough for the whole family and guests, a gym, a home office, a bedroom and bath. Not a services floor. A parallel world. Above it, the ground floor is organized around a courtyard open to the sky, the same move that defines the studio's larger houses, but here compressed and precise. The living spaces look inward. The street gets a white facade and a brick-clad upper floor; the house keeps the courtyard to itself.

The staircase is a vertical light shaft. A skylight at the top pulls daylight through the full height of the house, from the mumty level at 32 feet down to the ground. The first floor holds two bedrooms, a double-height foyer void, and a terrace. On the facade, a textured brick-clad panel on the upper floor sits against clean white render below, a material decision that gives the house texture without decoration. The wooden panel doors, marble window sills, and every junction in between were drawn and detailed before they were built.